Blockchain, the world’s leading bitcoin wallet, today announced that it hasraised over $30 million of capital in a Series A financing co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Wicklow Capital.
Blockchain has been bootstrapped since it was founded by Ben Reeves in 2011; this constitutes its first outside financing round.The UK-based company is the largest Bitcoin wallet in the world, with 2.3M consumer wallets, more than the rest of the industry combined.It is adding new wallets faster than any other Bitcoin wallet and since the beginning of the year has doubled its user base and surpassed US$ 26 billion in transaction volume.
“The company has grown exponentially in every way over the last eighteen months,” said Peter Smith, President of Blockchain. “We are honoured to add investors and partners to the team with deep expertise in financial services and consumer technology.”Blockchain plans to use the funds to scale its product & engineering teams, in order to develop innovative new features for its users. It will also invest to further its international expansion and increase bitcoin wallet functionality and usability for the next 20 million Bitcoin users.As part of the financing, Blockchain also welcomes Jeremy Liew, of Lightspeed Venture Partners, to its board of directors.“Bitcoin is a long game and the wallet is the crucial strategic high ground in the Bitcoin ecosystem,” said Liew, “We wanted to back the biggest player in the most important segment of the Bitcoin value chain, and that is Blockchain.”Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading venture capital firm with over $3 billion of committed capital under management and investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners.Over the past two decades, Lightspeed partners have backed more than 200 consumer and enterprise companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including AppDynamics, Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, Fusion-io, GrubHub, Informatica, Nest, Nicira, Nimble Storage, Nutanix, SnapChat and Riverbed Technology.“The potential for a global transformation in payments powered by Bitcoin is very exciting” said Sir Richard Branson, who also participated in the round.“Consumers are being offered much greater control and freedom with their money and more of them have chosen Blockchain’s safe and easy to use wallet to hold their Bitcoins than any other.”Other investors in the round include Mosaic Ventures, Prudence Holdings, Future Perfect Ventures, and a number of angels including Rafael Corrales of CRV, Amit Jhawar of Braintree and Nat Brown among others.
